News, opinions and tips from the Oracle SOA Suite Product Management team

I am pleased to announce the availability of Oracle's SOA/BPM/OSB 11g 11.1.1.7.0 Virtual Machine appliance. This VirtualBox virtual machine is meant for testing and evaluation purposes only. It is not certified, nor licensed for any production use. It is our most comprehensive virtual machine to date, with the following Oracle products installed, configured and functionally integrated within the appliance:

Oracle Linux 6 Update 4 (64-bit)

Oracle Database Express Edition 11g Release 2

Oracle SOA Suite 11.1.1.7.0 (includes Service Bus)

Oracle Event Processing 11.1.1.7.0

Oracle BPM Suite 11.1.1.7.1

Oracle Webcenter Content (Enterprise Content Management) 11.1.1.7.0

Oracle Webcenter Suite 11.1.1.7.0

Oracle Webcenter Portal 11.1.1.7.0

Oracle JDeveloper 11.1.1.7.0

Oracle JRockit

Java SE Development Kit

Refer to the README document for full details on the appliance features, installation guide, memory configurations, URLs, credentials and other recommended software.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why do we need a SOA Developer Virtual Machine?

Virtual Machines (VM) play an important role in increasing developer productivity; saving hours, if not days, of provisioning effort in standing up a fully functional, configured Fusion Middleware platform for testing and evaluation. Think of it as your very own Platform as a Service (PaaS) on your laptop/desktop!

What can I use the VM for?

A developer VM can prove useful for a variety of reasons: quick internal demos, proof of concepts, testing etc. For those new to Oracle SOA or BPM Suite, it can serve as a powerful tool to learn these technologies, which is why it is very popular for developer learning and training sessions. In fact, the VM includes pre-configured lab artifacts - "PO Processing" and "Sales Quote" - that are used in Oracle instructor-led training sessions and in the "Getting Started" books on Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite.

What benefits does the VM provide beyond simply installing the Oracle SOA Suite?

For enterprise development, installation of Oracle SOA Suite (or any single piece of software for that matter) is only a fraction of the overall effort needed to build an end-to-end configured development environment. Typical effort in standing up an integrated software stack on a "bare-metal" would involve the following provisioning tasks:

While you can always automate the above-mentioned steps, having a pre-provisioned DevOps style machine image can help you reduce development costs. It can get you from zero to a fully working SOA environment in minutes, on any developer's laptop. The benefits go beyond simply time to provision, it allows you to do more with less resources. For example, the VM allows developers to quickly switch between multiple running instances, each testing a new feature or version without the need for additional hardware.

We sincerely hope you enjoy using this VM and would love to hear your feedback!

Great news! I've been wanting to play with event processing. Would you mind posting the MD5 sum for the OVA file? I am getting a 'verr_tar_chksum_mismatch' error when importing the OVA yet all the parts (001-006) pass the MD5 sum. Thanks.

Few things you can try:
* Check that your JDev proxies are not set.
* Check that your Jdev is not routing your call to someone else's VM named soabpm-vm! That happens a lot within a network where a lot of folks are using the VM (like within Oracle).
* Try telnet into the VM 7001 port to check if the VM connectivity is an issue.
* Ensure that the WLS external listen address and Front-end host is setup correctly - although this may be less of an issue since it is seeded out of the box in this VM release.
* Try using the IP address instead of hostname in JDev to rule out hosts file issues.
* Follow all the networking steps in the README and search for "soabpm-vm connection" - a lot of folks have encountered networking issues with VMs (general to desktop virtualization networking, nothing specific to the SOA VM).